Huobi Chain Releases Whitepaper Amid “Crypto Winter”

While 2018 has undoubtedly slowed the crypto industry’s progress, a number of startups have forged ahead in their development efforts. And just weeks after Binance released a sneak peek of its in-house blockchain, which is currently centered around a low fee, near-instant, and scalable decentralized exchange, so has Huobi.

Huobi Drops Whitepaper For In-House Blockchain

On Saturday, the Huobi exchange’s overarching brand released a press release via PRNewswire, which outlined an English whitepaper for Huobi Chain, the company’s first foray into native blockchain development. The 79-page whitepaper, which was distributed in tandem with the release, highlighted the Chain team’s intentions and ambitions for the project. Although the paper was extensive, it was made clear that this venture’s overarching goal is to settle asset transactions “on the premise of transparency and regulation.”

To accomplish this (somewhat nebulous) vision, Huobi has enlisted a Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus model, which purportedly facilitates Byzantine Fault Tolerance. DPoS, for those who are unaware, is a consensus mechanism that allows users to allocate tokens to a predetermined number of delegates (nodes), who both generate interest and secure the network.

Commenting on the platform as a whole, Livio Weng, CEO of Huobi Global, remarked:

“This is just one more way that Huobi is seeking to improve the global digital asset and blockchain community. Once launched, Huobi Chain will offer users a variety of benefits, including security, transparency, fast, scalability, and smart contract capability.”

As stipulated by the roadmap contained in the whitepaper, a preliminary version of the blockchain could go live in Q4 2019. And while this timeline seems underwhelming, the press released maintained that Huobi’s developers, coupled with “industry experts,” are expected to make “significant progress” on the project over 2019.

This subsidiary was first publicly divulged in June, which was when Huobi’s Gordon Chen told the South China Morning Post that Chain’s vision is to turn Huobi into a decentralized autonomous organization.

Crypto Winter Freezes Huobi

Interestingly, this press release was dropped just days after a company spokeswoman confirmed that Huobi was “optimizing” its purported 1,000+ employees.

As reported by NewsBTC previously, Dovey Wan, the founding partner at Primitive and a crypto insider, claimed that Huobi’s “high % headcount cut” was a byproduct of overextension in 2017/early-2018. She claimed that Huobi flew too close to the Sun with its expansion efforts, along with its leading customer support team for “VIP customers.” And as such, Wan claimed that the startup created an “exam” to determine which employees to keep on payroll.

Huobi representatives have yet to divulge the extent of the layoffs, nor who/what company branches were cut, trimmed, or kept in full.